Samsung Galaxy Note 9 forums are now open

10 August 2018

The new phones will come out August 24. Instead, it appealed to something more human, more base: emotion.

Samsung also launched the Galaxy Home speaker, a device that will use its Bixby voice assistant and compete with similar products from Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google. People thought (myself included) that giant phones were a silly fad, soon to die. Of course, they weren't, and big phones went on to become the norm, with smaller handsets now being the odd exception in the marketplace. Truly small phones are all but extinct. The Note 9 is created to encourage adoption of the feature by allowing users to connect the phone to a monitor via an HDMI cable, bypassing the need to buy a separate docking station. Another thing the larger size allows is a larger battery: 4000mAh on the Note 9 compared to 3500mAh on the S9+.

The company hopes to break through its sales slump with the new Note, after it reported last month that its flagship Galaxy S9 phone missed sales targets.

Perhaps there will be more capacity, but most users won't need that and it won't be the lure that it is for the "Note community", as Samsung calls them. The Note now has a massive 4000mAh battery, a full 700mAh increase over the previous generation.

Under the hood is Samsung's in-house 10nm Exynos 9810 or Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 CPU (depending on region), paired with either 6GB or 8GB RAM depending on whether you pick up the 128GB or 512GB model. The only real sacrifice is in your wallet since it costs around $1,000. But the highlights will be a bigger battery, a faster processor and improved cellular speeds. You can control the camera with a press of the S Pen button, and there will be an SDK for developers to tie into the button in order to add new functionality.

Everything else about the Note9 is either iterative or simply a given. It has wireless charging, IP68 water and dust resistance, a headphone jack.no notch, a great stylus, and so much more.

In terms of network support and retailers, in the U.S. the LTE version of the Galaxy Watch, which is set to cost more than the base model, is being sold via AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, and the official Samsung online store. More troubling is the speed of security updates, especially if you buy the phone from a carrier. And that's not at all to say the Note is only for Samsung fans.

And that redesign really is key, arguably, to the success of the Galaxy Watch, as despite this new smartwatch packing some neat new features, the fact that it looks more like a regular watch will no-doubt be the foremost decider in whether potential adopters pull the trigger. Size aside, for anyone who is considering a new phone right now, the Note9 nearly has to enter the conversation - how can it not? Samsung said more details would come later this year. No, the Note goes it alone because it is the symbol of Samsung fandom, of the grass-roots community that gets out there and evangelizes the brand to friends, families, and coworkers.